Dealing With Errors and Annoyances From Atheists

Some of us have atheists in our lives who love to annoy us with their supposedly reasonable challenges to the faith. The New Atheist movement claims reason as its watchword, and they say that faith is always automatically unreasonable. Richard Dawkins has his “Foundation for Reason and Science,” Sam Harris has his “Project Reason,” and Al Stefanelli claims to be the “voice of reason in an unreasonable world.” Reason is what they’re all about, they say.

But you can’t pull out a book like that when someone challenges you. Usually it’s better anyway to ask a question than to challenge a person directly. If you find yourself in a situation where a co-worker calls you unreasonable for your belief, I suggest you just ask him or her, “What do you mean by that?” The idea there is to listen to them, to treat them as a human being, not an opponent in an argument, and to find out what they really think.

Depending on how they answer, you might follow that up by asking more specifically, “What do you mean by being reasonable, and how can you identify whether someone is reasonable or not?”

Here’s the typical New Atheist answer: reason is defined by whether a person lives according to physically observable evidence, which means that any faith in God is automatically unreasoning and unreasonable (more on that here). But that means the way to tell a person is reasonable is whether he reaches the “right” conclusion, not by how reasonably he got there. So I’d follow that up by asking, “Then the way we know whether you and I are reasonable is whether or not we agree with you, right?”

At this point I hope you’re smiling with them. Far better to have a friendly discussion than an argument!

In fact I wouldn’t suggest you carry it any further unless the person is really interested. If you make just one point like that one—if you “put a stone in their shoe,” as Greg Koukl puts it, that’s pretty good. They’re a lot more likely to come to faith in Christ by hearing about Jesus Christ himself than by losing an argument over reasonability.

If they really are interested, though, then I’d recommend you supply them with a copy of True Reason. It’s shameless self-promotion, I know, but it happens to be the best book I know of on the topic of atheism, Christianity, and reasonability.

One thought on “Dealing With Errors and Annoyances From Atheists”

The best response to atheism is to render it irrelevant through potent Christian works that demonstrate the full power of belief: revitalized lives; holy war against homelessness, poverty, and abuse of women and children; and courage to hold our political leaders accountable. When believers get serious about demonstrating Christ at work, and incurring the necessary risks in doing so, atheists will still insist that faith is unreasonable; but they will NOT be able to claim that faith is impotent.

scbrownlhrm on Atheists and “Evidence”VOR, ....defining God.... evidence for God... You've been given both: Reason. To be more accurate, we can say "Reason Itself" in the sense of mirroring the "classical theism" phrase of, "Being Itself". "Classical theism is the conception of God that has prevailed historically within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Western philosophical

Tom Gilson on Atheists and “Evidence”For the benefit of others who may read this without having been through the rest of the comments, I should mention that VOR's May 12 statement on what he would count as evidence for God is what I have repeatedly explained as constituting a new definition for "God," one that

Jenna Black on Atheists and “Evidence”VOR, Sorry to say, but you give yourself and atheism much too much credit. To tell Tom or any Christian or for that matter, any believer in God, that he or she cannot prove that God exists is to merely state the obvious. But it matters not in the least,

Tom Gilson on Atheists and “Evidence”I think I said I was done trying to explain all this. I really am. You can declare yourself the winner all you want. I'm thinking there's a Dunning-Kruger explanation for your thinking that. But we're going to end up disagreeing no matter what. You have the right, naturally, to

Discussion Policy

Commenters must agree to abide by this site's discussion policy.
Comments close automatically after 120 days.

Some books reviewed on this blog are attached to my account with Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, and I receive a small percentage of revenue from those sales.